Third Time’s a Charm: ACR Poker Handles Yet Another RTA Controversy

One Bad Marketing Decision to Burn

On September 16th, 2026, account TrenirusGTO published on X/Twitter a video of someone playing at one of WPN skins using real-time assistance for decision-making. All nicknames were covered to prevent identification.

It quickly spread throughout the poker community — fueled in part by the account’s owner, who aggressively reposted his post in the comments sections of various players’ posts in an attempt to draw attention to himself, obviously to sell this cheating tool.

It didn’t go very well, though: poker players were collectively outraged — both by the fact that some scoundrel was openly cheating in online poker without a shred of shame, and by the fact that the poker room was doing nothing about his software on the video.

Among those who expressed contempt for the video’s creator was Chris Moneymaker; he was particularly incensed that the individual was masking an attempt to violate the poker room’s rules with the noble-sounding pretext of helping to improve players’ games:

Chris Moneymaker

This shit is not improving your game it is blatant cheating and anyone caught using it will have their funds confiscated

TrenirusGTO proceeded into a dispute with Chris, insisting that “If you know nothing about the game it’d eventually 100% improve it. AND MUCH FASTER THAN BORING CHARTS AND THEORY” — but Chris was not impressed with this argument:

Chris Moneymaker

First you can’t use it while actively playing. Second no people would click the button without learning why. Take the tool away and they be just as lost months later. This is nothing more than a cheating tool that will cost people money.

Chris, of course, was not the only well-known player to express an opinion on the situation.

Patrick Leonard emphasised that this just a tip of an iceberg of RTA issues in poker:

Patrick Leonard

This is very scary but the scary thing is this is less than 1% of the actual big scary rta news that every reg has been speaking nonstop about for the last 1 week.

Matt Berkey joined the discussion by sharing other kind of concerns regarding RTA with AI in online poker:

Matt Berkey

With how easy it is to build tools using AI now, it’s not really a question of if there is RTA going on (it probably hasn’t been a question for years), but rather how good is the real time info they receive. I really struggle to envision an ending that isn’t the operators and the cheats making all the money.

WPN CEO Phil Nagy himself weighed in and commented on the video:

“RTA is 100% a concern for the poker industry.

We currently ban players caught using tools like this, and ACR is the ONLY site on the planet that shows all hole cards face up at a final table.

Why? Because if we miss something, the community can spot it, call it out, and we’ll address it.

The LAST place you want to use RTA is on ACR Poker.

We catch you, we ban you for life.”

Interestingly, many people in this situation suspected the fraudulent account of trolling and using AI generation to create the illusion that their RTA tool was being used in-game to drive sales. However, the ACR Poker team treated the matter with a level of seriousness that many did not expect from the room.

ACR Poker Responded Within a Day

Unlike the cases of former ambassadors Ebony Kenney and Nacho Barbero — who both were caught using a solver during an active session on ACR Poker, yet cleared of any rule violations following a room’s investigation — in this instance the team decided to act swiftly and decisively.

First, the official ACR Poker account posted a lengthy statement on X/Twitter regarding the situation:

Overall, this statement was met with a lukewarm reception; summarized in Crispin Rovere’s general indignation over the fact that the poker room’s software generally fails to react to third-party software of this kind:

“It’s an outrage that ACR do not have adequate detection tools and mechanisms already.

This is a straightforward prerequisite for the platform to run poker games at all, not something to be investigated after the fact once publicly exposed.

All play should cease on the platform until ACR can guarantee game integrity for all players.”

However, it turned out that ACR Poker decided not to limit itself to just a statement condemning RTA this time; instead, the site revealed the username and other details of the user who was a hero of TrenirusGTO’s video:

• Username — UGLYRETD
• Date of account creation — 8/2/2026
• Deposits — $14.13
• Playtime on ACR Poker — 1 day
• 65 hands played at $0.05/0.10
• 27 hands played at $0.02/0.05
• 19 hands played at $0.01/0.02
• Recorded net loss — $13.12

ACR Poker decided to ban this account and to issue refunds to the seven players affected by it — covering the hands played against the account — within 24 hours of the post’s publication.

As proof of identification, ACR also released a video from the same table TrenirusGTO showed in his video — but with all the screen names revealed:

Finally, the team thanked the poker community for its quick response and for bringing the scammer’s posts to ACR Poker’s attention:

“Protecting the integrity of our games is a shared responsibility, and reports from players and the wider poker community are an important part of that process.

As new forms of prohibited assistance continue to emerge, we will continue evolving our detection, investigation, and enforcement processes. 

We will not publicly detail those methods, but our position remains unequivocal:

Real-Time Assistance is prohibited on ACR Poker. Accounts found using it will be permanently banned, and affected players will be made whole.

We appreciate the poker community holding us accountable, and we will continue working to make ACR Poker a safer and fairer place to play.”

Poker Community Still Isn’t Particularly Happy

While some players, such as Rob Gardner, praise ACR Poker for finally becoming somewhat transparent, others express mixed feelings.

Some people are displeased with the fact that the room explicitly shifts the responsibility for the work of its security and integrity team onto the poker community, adopting the stance: “This is a complex job — let’s do it together”.

Other players point out that the resolution of this specific case does nothing to protect the community from continued use of RTA by cheaters.

Finally, the particularly skeptical view this situation as a marketing stunt by ACR Poker — an attempt to clear its reputation by publicly rejecting RT at a time when the room faces frequent criticism regarding bots and a lack of adequate tools to combat cheaters.

We will not definitively claim that one of these positions is more accurate than the other. However, one thing is certain: this situation confirms that concerns regarding the rapid evolution of fraud tools — which poker rooms struggle to quickly identify — remain valid and are only intensifying.

Poker rooms must urgently adopt stricter countermeasures, and prominent figures in the poker world need to unite and speak out more forcefully against RTA.

Otherwise, we truly risk losing online poker as a viable profession.